There are new wireless data services routinely becoming available even as wireless voice services improve. Increasingly to take advantage of these data and improved voice services, particularly simultaneous use of such services, means that there must be several different ways to establish communications between the network and the user mobile device or between mobile devices. To this end there have been developed what are known as multiradio mobile devices. These multiradio devices include several different radio access systems that enable the use of diverse mobile services.
Examples of such different networks include mobile telephony networks (e.g., evolved universal terrestrial radio access network E-UTRAN, global system for mobile communication GSM), wireless local area networks WLANs and WiFi networks, and piconets (e.g., Bluetooth), to name a few. Often a multiradio device will have one radio for voice (or combined voice/data) service over a traditional cellular network and another radio for data communications over another network (e.g., WLAN), but multiradio devices need not have those two types of radios. A multiradio device may have radio for communication for access to a WLAN access point, a Bluetooth radio for access to a printer or headset, and no access to traditional voice service over cellular. Similarly, a mobile terminal/mobile station may have a GSM modem, a UTRAN modem and a digital video broadcast for handhelds DVB-H modem. An individual multiradio device may also have more than one radio for communicating over a single network, such as a mobile station having two cellular radios so as to avoid switching between an active Node B and another Node B in preparation for a handover. The hardware (and related software) for accessing these various networks is termed a radio access system RAS, and each has a modem and a transceiver.
For the case where the two RASs operate under control of different wireless networks, the times during which one RAS may be scheduled to receive or authorized to send by a first network is generally not coordinated with the times the other modem is scheduled to receive or authorized to send by another network. This leads to the potential for the RASs to interfere with one another when transmitting or receiving simultaneously, in that sometimes the different networks use frequency ranges that overlap and each network might schedule/authorize the different RASs of the multiradio device to transmit/receive at the same time and frequency. The result is wasted bandwidth due to data collisions from different RASs of the same wireless device.
Several solutions to the collision/interference problem are presented in U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 11/647,620 and 11/647,615, each filed on Dec. 29, 2006 and respectively entitled “Multiradio Synchronization and Scheduling Control” and “Apparatus, Method and Computer Program Products providing Pattern masking and Traffic Rule Matrix Scheduling for Multiradio Control”. Both those co-pending applications are hereby incorporated by reference.
To summarize, the above references describe a controlling mechanism in a multiradio device that solves the above interoperability problems in the air interface. These are termed multiradio controllers MRCs, and they calculate suitable time slots for each radio access system to send and receive information, thereby avoiding collisions when time and frequency domains schedules overlap. Because the times of the different networks are not slaved to a common clock, synchronizing the transmission and receptions scheduled in those different networks is an important part of the collision avoidance solution, and is detailed with particularity in each of those above references.
Now the majority of multiradio devices are owned and operated by individuals as mobile stations/mobile telephones. These end users often prefer various additional functionality in their multiradio devices, some of which are power intensive (e.g., a camera with flash). Other such functions include image processing, creating and editing documents, and the like. Term these non-radio sub-systems. Because these user devices are portable, they are powered by a limited power supply, typically galvanic/battery. This additional non-radio functionality becomes important for the devices from a commercial perspective and the desire for multiple RASs is also on the rise. Both the multiple RASs and the non-radio sub-systems draw from the same limited power source. This leads to a degenerating problem of power consumption in multiradio devices.
What is needed in the art is a way to decrease or better manage power consumption in a portable multiradio device.